Free as a Verb: Art, Speech, and Conflict in Antebellum America

What did “free speech” mean before the Civil War...and what did it cost? Today, I'm exploring how Americans have debated the meaning of liberty through words, images, and even violence beginning with Samuel Jennings’s 1792 painting 'Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences' in 1790. Commissioned by Philadelphia’s Library Company, this version of liberty is imagined as a goddess who uses her staff to bestow knowledge and emancipation. 

Fast forward six decades, and a very different rod appears in the infamous 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner, captured in the print engraving 'Southern Chivalry.' Here, a gold-topped cane becomes a weapon to silence anti-slavery speech on the Senate floor.

Along the way, we’ll trace how abolitionists like Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and Frederick Douglass defended speech as action, not abstraction, and how attempts to gag or punish words have only sharpened conflict in American history.

Today's Works: Samuel Jennings, ‘Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or The Genius of America Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks’ (c. 1792). Library Company of Philadelphia.

and 

John L. Magee, ‘Southern chivalry - argument versus clubs.’ 1856.

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